Excellent passage.

As a society, we have a certain tendency to feel sorry for ourselves. If we have “social anxiety”, we like to give it a quasi-medical diagnosis. We rarely suspect that we may actually have something bad in our intentions. Many forms of anxiety are actually rooted in impure motives, especially when there is another part of us that conflicts with that motive. The conflict may result from a shred of conscience that enters into a tug-of-war with our impure motives. It could be rooted in a cognitive denial of those motives, as denial of truth can manifest in subconscious turbulence and nervous expressions of emotional energy. Perhaps we want to indulge those impure motives, but lack the chutzpah to do so, creating internal tension (the chutzpah would produce its own psychic anguish). Perhaps we’re selfish, but fail to recognize it. These sorts of things cause turmoil in the soul that can create anxiety.

Think of the “nice guy”. “Nice Guys” are some of the biggest assholes around. They’re two-faced schemers. A “Nice Guy’s niceness” is instrumental; he will be “nice” to a woman he finds attractive, because he has already imagined in his head that this will ingratiate him with her. He has already created a ledger in his mind: “if I am nice to this woman, then she is in my debt and now owes me the desired approval in return”. But the moment this woman fails to conform to the expectations of this “Nice Guy” is the moment his comes for his pound of flesh. You see the mask drop and his nastiness surface. The anxiety is rooted, among other things, in a failure to recognize the humanity and rights of this woman. For him, her meaning and her being are totally exhausted by his sexual desire, perhaps because he sees his own meaning exhausted by her approval, hence the apparent magnitude and terrific importance of her judgement. He wants to dominate by force or by manipulation rather than allow a woman to choose to surrender voluntarily, because she has determined this is good.

Magnanimity is one of the high virtues of classical virtue ethics - a sort of crowning culmination of them - and one of the features of magnanimous people is that they are at ease around others. It is well worth returning to this virtue ethics, because it does enlighten us about the nature of moral excellence.

Love is willing the genuine good of the other, unselfishly. There is no fear in someone of perfect love.